There's a good movie here buried under a heap of problems. Still, the visuals and music alone are enough to bump it up to a moderate ranking, along with a painfully underused but damn enjoyable Michael Sheen.

This isn't even a sequel I was waiting for, but as a new fan, I'm still disappointed. This Tron has some amazing visuals and a couple of cool ideas, but just doesn't execute them in the way the long-awaited sequel should. The first Tron is and will always be, a classic. They sequel bait the fate of the title character, and I'd like to see that with a better team behind it. This is all really a shame, because I'd like more Tron movies, and clearly they do too. I haven't even mentioned how this 'grid' world feels so much smaller than the whole computer world of the first movie, how they sideline the title character in a manner akin to Hawkeye in the first Avengers, or how they totally drop surviving characters from the first movie who played an important role. You feel the function of the scene and not the emotion of the scene every time, and it just makes these bits a chore to sit through. Every bit of writing in Tron Legacy is there to serve a function: this is the scene where they need to get something, this is the scene where they fail, this is the scene where they have a heart-to-heart. It's not like the first Tron was a masterpiece, but watching these two back-to-back, you realize how much better the writing in that one is. That's sort of the point of the story, but rather than the goofy fun of the first movie everything is put through this gothic-techno layer that looks cool for action sequences but after a while just becomes a bore for your story. The first Tron had such a joy and energy to it. Beautiful rooms and imagery of people talking with no personality. These are very interesting ideas, but they are presented in the dullest way possible. Jeff Bridges' character Flynn has stuck in the computer world for 20 years after a coup by his computer alter-ego resulting from him discovering 'life' in this world. Once we get off-grid though I started to remember.

Once we got to the Grid I had to ask myself 'how did I ever hate this movie, this is awesome!' The disc fights, are great, and I will fight anyone who says that lightcycle sequence isn't one of the best sci-fi action scenes of the last decade. I understood what was going on a little more, that helped, and the connections to the first movie were a little forced but I understood their need. Honestly at first in my re-watch I was into it.

Do I like more or less having now seen the original? Both. In my first viewing I really liked the visuals, but was overall extremely disappointed.

This is sort of a re-review, since I did see this when it first came out, but at the time I had not seen the original Tron.

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